‘Capital and small B with bar/stroke (U+0243/U+0180) much appreciated..’

Introduction to the Doulos SIL Font Package

Welcome to the Doulos SIL font package. The goal for this product was to provide a single Unicode-based font family that would contain a comprehensive inventory of glyphs needed for almost any Roman- or Cyrillic-based writing system, whether used for phonetic or orthographic needs. In addition, there is provision for other characters and symbols useful to linguists. This font makes use of state-of-the-art font technologies to support complex typographic issues, such as the need to position arbitrary combinations of base glyphs and diacritics optimally.

Doulos is very similar to Times/Times New Roman, but only has a single face - regular. It is intended for use alongside other Times-like fonts where a range of styles (italic, bold) are not needed.

Overview of the Doulos SIL Font

This Doulos SIL font is essentially the same design as the SIL Doulos font first released by SIL in 1992. The design has been changed from the original in that it has been scaled down to be a better match with contemporary digital fonts, such as Times New Roman®. This current release is a regular typeface, with no bold or italic version available or planned.

Note:

We reserve the right to alter metrics in future releases. Future versions of the font may result in different lines, line spacing, or paragraph lengths. Do not expect that a document laid out in one version will always have the same page breaks, etc., in future fonts.

The Doulos SIL font differs significantly from SIL Doulos in the following ways:

SIL Doulos, as other fonts included in the SIL Encore Fonts package, was provided not as a working font but as a “library” font from which working fonts could be made using the TypeCaster program. In contrast, Doulos SIL is a working font to be used as is, not as a basis for derivative fonts.

Doulos SIL is a Unicode-encoded font. The encoding is entirely different from the old font, or most working fonts produced from it. Data created for use with the old font (or its derivatives) will most likely have to be re-typed or converted before it will display with the Doulos SIL font.

Doulos SIL is a TrueType font with “smart font” capabilities added using the Graphite, OpenType®, and AAT font technologies. This means that complex typographic issues such as the placement of diacritics or the formation of ligatures are handled by the font, provided you are running an application that provides an adequate level of support for one of these smart font technologies. With the old font (and its derivatives), diacritic placement was handled using non-standard character encodings that incorporated multiple versions of a diacritic as distinctly-encoded characters.